Modern data centers consume tens of Megawatts of power with little regard for energy efficiency. On average, each server rack in a typical data center consumes electricity on the order of 8 kW. In a data center utilizing higher density server racks, the electricity consumed by data center operations may exceed 30 kW per server rack.
A typical data center operates at around a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of about 2.0 which indicates that the data center's overall power demand is about two times greater than the Information Technology (IT) equipment load. In an average data center, that equates to for each one Watt of power consumed by the IT equipment, an additional one Watt of power is utilized for cooling and delivering power to the IT equipment.
Most of the electrical energy utilized by the data center is consumed by the computing units and temperature control equipment in the data center, and expelled as waste heat. Additional power is used to expel the waste heat from the data center into the surrounding environment.